Sunday, February 15, 2009

Icing on the Tail of Flight 3407

I was talking with a pilot I have known for some time. We were talking about the crash of flight 3407 and he said that, the de-icing was turned on too late and he said that he thinks ice was fodding out the engines.

He explained that by the conditions I described from the skew-t data, ice would be building up on the front edge of the engines and would have broken off before being completed melted.

He said that icing on the tail was what caused it to go down.

He had seen the photos of the aircraft and said it didn't nose dive. And it looked like at the last moment before impact that the plane's nose had lifted and dropped.

He and I agreed that the pilots where not being notified of icing conditions.